Join Blackstar’s Steve Marks in their April webcast. Steve will be demonstrating how to get the Country sound from your Blackstar amp. From chicken picking to the twang of those Country chords, Blackstar has an amp to suit.

We say it all the time at KGMC, you don’t have to put a ton of money into gear to get some ideas recorded. Money helps, but if you’ve got a bad song, or you’re doing it wrong, it doesn’t matter.

If you need some help picking out some essential pieces of gear to get it going, talk to us. We all write and record to differing degrees, on different computers, with different software, different instruments, different music, etc. You get the point.

The guy in the video is doing a recording challenge with a $300 budget, and his recording sounds great. Of course he knows what he is doing and he has a great song, but the gear isn’t getting in the way.

In this video he works on vocals and some auxiliary sounds. He’s using an old laptop, Garage Band, $30 headphones, a $79 microphone, a homemade egg shaker, a free Garage Band soft synth, and a tambourine. How do you think this sounds?

The key is to write good music and learn how to use the tools you have or can afford to purchase. Don’t let the pursuit of gear get in the way of you making and recording music. There’s no excuse.

Ever get sore fingers from playing too much? Or, are you not playing enough to get some good calluses built up?

Rock-Tips is a specially formulated, non-toxic application for use in protecting sensitive fingertips while playing a guitar, bass or other stringed instrument. When applied to your fingertips, Rock-Tips creates a thin, protective membrane that is extremely tough, allowing you to play longer and build your natural guitar calluses up faster.

In the past, many musicians have relied on strong glues and liquid bandages to help relieve fingertip pain, all with less than perfect results. Household glue is very brittle and unforgiving, while liquid bandages gum up instrument strings and wear off quickly.

Rock-Tips Liquid Callus Formula is based around a medical adhesive, which is designed specifically for use on human skin. With additional polymers added for flexibility and strength, our proprietary formula acts and feels like a hardened layer of skin – with all the flexibility and toughness of a real callus. Rock-Tips will stay on even during the most grueling sessions, and scrubs off with soap and water.

This is a common problem for newbies and veterans alike, PHASING! Its basically what results when you put more than one microphone on a single sound source. The sound traveling to each microphone arrives at the same time essentially, but a different part of the sound wave is picked up by each mic. When this happens you get exactly the opposite of what you intended. Instead of this big cool sound of two or more awesome mics, you get a thin, nasally, metallic sound.

There are definitely ways around it. One of the easiest ways, but takes another person, is to put up one of the microphones, and while placing the other microphone(s), listen with headphones. You will definitely hear phasing going on. It will sound exactly like a phaser guitar pedal as you move the second microphone. It doesn’t matter if you are mic’ing a guitar or an amp or a snare drum. It’s physics baby.

There is another type of phasing that occurs with outboard gear and cabling too. Check out this page on what phasing is and how it occurs. LINK

Like this:

Great demo by Pete Thorn and Thomas Nordegg on how long cables effect your tone and how buffered pedals can “correct” the signal loss and how true bypass pedals really don’t get in the way. Check it out.